Dr Rachele De Felice

Education and Experience

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, working on the pragmatics of Business English emails

Posdoctoral Research Fellow at ETS (Princeton, New Jersey), working on automated identification of
speech acts in emails, and on automated scoring of open score
content test answers

DPhil
(PhD) in Computational Linguistics at Oxford University (Department
of Computer Science), working on automatic error detection in
non-native English writing, using models which can predict what
preposition or determiner is most likely to occur in a given context

MPhil in Linguistics and BA in English literature, Oxford University

Research Interests

My research is in the field of corpus pragmatics. It focuses on speech act annotation and the creation of pragmatic profiles of Business English by applying corpus analysis and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to large collections of real-world data. It addresses the following questions:

What are the main pragmatic characteristics of Business English?

Are there significant pragmatic variations in spoken, written, and email Business English?

How do these findings compare to the pragmatic features of other types of communication, such as everyday conversation?

The techniques used to extract pragmatic profiles can also be adapted to further our understanding of communication in other specialised domains such as social work or health communication, addressing issues such as the pragmatic strategies used in presenting upsetting information, or in interacting with patients of different ages.

My postdoctoral research project focused on understanding pragmatic content of short texts, especially those written by learners of English, for the ultimate goal of automated assessment. In particular, I looked at emails in a workplace context, to see whether it is possible to automatically recognise the speech acts contained in each sentence by relying on a combination of lexical and syntactic features. The data collected and analysed for this research also offers insights into the patterns preferred by L2 English learners in formulating speech acts, which can be compared to L1 models.

Articles and Chapters in Books

Rachele De Felice (2013). A corpus-based classification of commitments in Business English. in J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013, pp.153-171 [link]